A Retail Christmas begins on the Friday after Thanksgiving, which is known as "Black Friday." I had heard that "Black Friday" was so named because that's when businesses start to go into the black, meaning make a profit. But I think that the people who have to work at retail stores on the day after Thanksgiving gave it the name, and for totally different reasons.

Stores open early on Black Friday, offering "early bird specials" starting as early as six in the morning. And customers show up. I'm not sure if the stores open early because customers want them to, of if customers show up because the store are open early, but it is a wildly successful strategy.

This year on Black Friday, GAFO stores -- which include general merchandise stores, clothing stores, home furnishing stores, electronics and appliance stores, book, music and hobby stores, sporting goods stores, and office supply and stationary stores -- did $7.2 billion is net sales, up 4.8 percent from Black Friday last year.

I am the assistant manager at a chain store offering specialty products for woodworkers, furniture makers and cabinet shops. We opened two hours early -- seven o'clock -- on Black Friday and did almost three times the business we do on a regular Friday.

The Christmas season is our busy season. We hire seasonal help, inflate our inventory, stay open later, bulk stack merchandise, and work nonstop. It starts in early November, when the Christmas merchandise starts coming in, and goes until after Christmas when the returns and exchanges season starts. The Christmas season is the busy season for almost all retail stores (excluding, most notably, auto sales). Consumer spending accounts for almost two-thirds of the U.S. economy, and consumers spend during the month before Christmas.

All this being what it is, working a retail Christmas has been the biggest blow to my holiday spirit since I saw David O'Sullivan changing into a Santa suit before a Christmas party where my dad worked.

To expand on this a little, retail stores dramatically increase their inventory in November so that when Black Friday comes, they will be ready. Receiving, storing or displaying this huge amount of stuff is a colossal undertaking and the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving are filled with unloading trucks, moving boxes, studying Merchandise Action Plans, implementing Tactical Inventory Plans.

And then the kicker comes. Because you're open late the day before Thanksgiving, and early the day after, you can't go home to see your family.

But whatever. Summer is your slow season, so you can take long vacations to Martha's Vineyard, and just think about that overtime check. Most people don't mind working hard: it makes the day go by faster and there is certainly money to be made in a seasonal part-time job or in overtime.

But the real issue here is not so much that you're working so hard, it's what you're working for. Unloading a truck is fine, but when you're unloading a truck of poorly made merchandise that you will sell to people who don't need it, just because it's $10 off in a Special Holiday Promotion, you get a sick sense of not liking the role you play in society. This is alienation.

Everyone bitches about how the holidays have become so commercialized. But I do the commercialization. I display the shoddy, made in Taiwan, high margin items where I think you'll be most likely to buy them. I contribute to the mystery of waking up at six in the morning the day after Thanksgiving and going shopping because I wake up that early to open the store and swipe your credit card.

I am helping to make Christmas more lame and more commercial, even though I love Christmas. I am doing something counterproductive to my own goals and desires, and this does not put me in the Christmas spirit. It might ease my conscience to think of all the consumers I am enabling a merry Christmas for, but it doesn't. It doesn't because of one more sad and counterproductive fact regarding a retail Christmas: I hate customers.

American consumers, sensing that they make up two-thirds of our economy, have what we in the field call, "Entitlement." With more and more on-line and catalogue retail successes, actual brick and mortar stores have had to adapt to stay viable. And the most common adaptation was to push customer service and technical support, two areas that my store specializes in. This strategy has had an unexpected result, however: we have created a Frankensteinian monster of rude, entitled consumers.

For example: on Black Friday, we offered customers in the store a coupon that entitled them to 25 percent off of one purchase made between 7am and 11am. One customer would take a coupon, make one purchase, walk around the store, take another coupon, make one purchase, and so on. On his third 25 percent off purchase, he was notified that this was the last coupon he could use, that he was taking advantage, and that we were on to him. He complained to the corporate higher-ups and had a gift certificate mailed to him, because they were so sorry a store employee had been so rude to him.

Now, I don't care about profitability any more than my small salary allows. But I do have a problem with rewarding bad behavior. Customers who come into my store and are friendly and polite get nothing but the good service expected of retail employees. Customers who are rude, confrontational and who complain to managers and district managers get free stuff. And the lesson here is not a good one.

Let me tell you a secret: if you want discounts or free stuff, you just have to be a total asshole and you will get it. Brick and mortar retail stores depend too much on customer satisfaction and most employees are trained to give in rather than escalate a problem. Now, if you can do this is in good conscience and convince yourself that what you are doing is ethical, allow me to play devil's advocate.

Every time you behave poorly in a retail store, you upset someone who is working there. It's not because they have any immediate stake in the store's bottom line, it is because they work here everyday, and deal with scores of human beings everyday, and see a lot of different personalities, and unlike in their normal lives, when they are at work, they are required to be be nice and polite to everyone. That said, when a customer comes in and acts like an asshole, the employee is powerless to do anything about it. And while it is ultimately the business and not the employee who is being taken advantage of, the employee feels taken advantage of, and nobody deserves to be made to feel this way just because you are too cheap to pay full price. Most of these employees are college students, or parents working part-time. They work odd hours, weekends and holidays, they are paid poorly and have little access to benefits like health insurance and retirement. They don't also need you being an asshole to fuck with their day.

Entitlement presupposes some kind of qualitative difference between the entitled one and everyone else in the world. This difference requires a judgment, namely, that the entitled one is better than others. And this is totally not the Spirit of Christmas.

But also, entitlement is concerned only with getting, even though these things are obtained largely to be given away as gifts.

In fact, the reason that the concept of Santa Claus continues to thrive is because it allows people to give gifts anonymously. A non-anonymous gift always demands some recognition of the giver. But a gift from "Santa Claus" can be given and the receiver is in no way obligated to thank anyone, or be impressed with anyone's taste or effort or affluence. An anonymous gift allows the giver to give for just the pleasure of giving, and this is the most meaningful form of gifting.

I can just imagine these entitled bastards on Christmas morning, going into a long story of how hard it was to get this gift and how unhelpful the employees were and how crowded the store was and how didn't he do a great job? Didn't he?

The majority of customers are not like this. But these rotten few sour the experience for many. A serious and conscious effort must be made by employees to keep these few greedy, nasty people from coloring their perceptions of an entire season. Couple that with the subtle resent of having Christmas come to symbolize the season of your most hard work, and the alienation that comes with playing a major role in the commercialization of a holiday, and it won't be a very merry Christmas this year.